Taking over the mantle from Saw as the horror franchise which has gone on well past its sell-by-date, Paranormal Activity is once again upon us in time for Halloween. The fourth installment attempts to update the proceedings from regular cameras to web cams and mobile phones, which is just another excuse for the audience to see all angles of the house. Some things never change…
It’s been a few years since the events of the 3rd film and this time around we centre on a new family, chiefly focusing on the 15-year-old daughter Alex (Kathryn Newton). When a strange young boy who lives across the street comes to stay with them after his mum is hospitalized, the family start to notice strange goings-on in their house while the cameras record everything.
Paranormal Activity 4 takes the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach, basically repeating the style which has made the series in excess of $575 million worldwide thus far. But the trouble is this found-footage style has gotten very old and the fourth film fails to liven things up. Even the modern technology employed – which should have happened two films ago if you ask me – only seeks to remind us just how tired this franchise has become. It adds a new dynamic but the repetitive end result is the same.
The first film was a breath of fresh air and was actually very effective for what it was aiming to be, making the most out of a shoestring budget to create suspenseful, well paced and well timed scares. The sequel made the mistake of thinking bigger was better, once again proving that more money doesn’t automatically mean a better movie. The third, while no masterpiece, at least brought the franchise back to some of its previous heights, hinting at some potentially interesting mythology to back up the mysterious events. The fourth film, sadly, never capitalizes on the potential of the third outing’s revealing – if rather random – final showdown and presents us with one of the year’s most disappointing “Is that it?!” endings.
What’s perhaps most disappointing about the film, however, is just how dull it is. Unsuccessfully attempting to get us to invest in a new family (and the daughter’s annoying would-be boyfriend), the pace is all over the place and the scares are comparatively tame. The set-up is basically a blank canvas for all sorts of bumps-in-the-night but this one wastes that ample opportunity.
While not completely without its tense moments here and there Paranormal Activity 4 is nevertheless uninspired horror filmmaking. Regular screenwriter Christopher Landon (who has written all of the sequels thus far) could have taken the franchise in the fresh direction I think we deserve by this point in the game, particularly hardcore fans of the series as a whole, but is evidently content to keep things stilted. And returning directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman cannot muster the necessary scares to make this even a passable installment in what has to be one of the most perfunctory mainstream horror franchises around.
Paranormal Activity snore…
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